while six months pregnant and lightly spotting, and then to head to Libya, reaching its coast when you are eight months pregnant and bleeding more steadily, where you then launch yourself out to sea, in a small dinghy, stuffed with eighty other people, heading for Lampedusa—in that situation it will certainly help to be bloody, and therefore sanguine, though with a touch of black bile, which will make you goal-oriented and determined.
* * *
• • •
To separate an un-potty-trained four-year-old from its mother at the border and place it in confinement, with several other children of similar age, and a crate of Pampers, as if you hope the children will figure out how to change themselves, and then to walk past the visiting nurse and social worker with lowered eyes as you three pass each other at the tent flap, because none of you can quite stand to look at each other—to perform this action it is essential that you have phlegm and are phlegmatic in general, so that you can be good at generalizing ideas or problems in the world and making compromises.
* * *
• • •
If your great-grandparents were sharecroppers, and you’re the first of your clan to attend university, and you are interested in the philosophy of the self, and your dream is to be a photographer, and you are studying in the hope of achieving your goal, but by graduation you will owe a hundred and thirty thousand dollars in student loans—in this case you will develop a melancholy strain of bile, which manifests itself in a strive for perfection, which other, less sensitive people, like your roommates, will experience as irritating, and diagnose as OCD, citing as evidence your tendency not to be able to leave the apartment until all the knobs on the cooker are facing north and the cheap, plastic blinds are partially raised to the exact same height to let the light through.
* * *
• • •
When a beloved parrot dies? Melancholy, forsooth, only melancholy.
Roberta and Preston (A Dialog)
Roberta (reading from the paper): They’re saying it’s made almost no difference.
Preston: That’s a laugh!
Roberta: It doesn’t matter what he does, because it’s not rational, it’s emotional.
Preston: That’s a laugh!
Roberta: Except it’s not very funny.
Preston: Twenty-ee-ee-five hours to go! I wanna be sedated!
Roberta: I’m being serious. They’re still behind him. He makes them feel good. They want him to just go ahead and shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue like he promised.
Preston: I wanna be sedated! I wanna be sedated!
Roberta: Okay, okay, okay . . . Did I feed Edie? Did you see me feed Edie? Did Edie already eat?
Preston: That’s a laugh!
Roberta (closing the paper): Well, if we’re lucky maybe one of us will drop dead off our perch before 2020.
Preston (under his breath): Lord, let it be me.
All the Moods vs. the Individual
Zenobia was dog-sitting for the photographer lady downstairs, who had traveled to Pennsylvania to bury her parrot in a famous pet cemetery. It was an opportunity to see the apartment. What was amazing about the apartments of long-standing adults was the accumulation of incidental texture. Not: I went and bought this lamp and this poster so I would have a lamp and a poster to furnish my life. But just stuff, so much stuff everywhere, somehow the consequence of a certain amount of time on earth. For her Tumblr (entirely unfollowed), Zenobia photographed:
36 DVD cases of old movies two thirds of which were empty
A gypsy shawl hung over a lamp waiting to burn down the whole building
A large black dildo standing proud on a side table and signed in silver Sharpie by someone apparently un-Googleable
Four pairs of red silk Chinese slippers, very beautiful
A little pyramid of dog hair on the windowsill
All around the apartment were photographs taken by the tenant, extraordinary photographs of old punks when young—stylish, smart, daring, strikingly composed photographs, taken on a real camera—but Zenobia found herself unable to photograph them. Just looking at them was hard enough. She fed Edie, remembering to hide the pill in the wet food and separate wet from dry. She lay on the floor. Her new Liberian twists fanned out around her head. She tried to muster the energy to lift her phone to her eyes and thus locate herself in the online DSM. Edie shuffled by, paying Zenobia no mind. For half a century, “feeling unreal” was known as DPD (De-personalization Disorder), but has recently been renamed and recategorized as DDD (De-personalization/De-realization Disorder), which refers not only to the